Last night Tony Abbott treated the world to the unedifying spectacle of his use of a global forum (the World Economic Forum in Davos) to criticise his Labor opponents . There's a lot else to dislike about his speech. It was a classic of simplistic dry economics - low taxes, deregulation. He also made the breathtaking claim that "stronger economic growth is the key to addressing almost every global problem", conveniently ignoring the fact that decades of growth have done no such thing. If you keep doing the same thing, you will get the same results. However, I was most interested in the way he used the speech to criticise the Labor Government's economic stimulus program, suggesting that this program was unnecessary and caused the economic problems we are facing now by pushing the government into debt. Doubly interesting when in the same speech he urged the US to exercise caution in winding back its much more ambitious stimulus program. You could see this
'Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp.' - Rachel Carson